Identity assurance is the ability for a party to determine, with some level of certainty, that an electronic credential, representing an entity with which the party interacts to effect an operation, can be trusted to actually belong to the entity. Knowledge-based authentication is a method of authentication which seeks to prove the identity of an entity accessing a service. For example, knowledge-based authentication can use knowledge of private information of a particular individual to prove that an individual who provides identity information (e.g., in order to access a service) is actually the particular individual.